“Obama is a Marxist,” Mark Levin, my favorite talk-show host, proclaims. Levin is probably the smartest guy on radio. But when it comes to Obama, even this smart guy doesn’t quite get it.

Obama is not a Marxist. He is a fascist of the left, a Peronist. And that is not an academic hair split. To understand this distinction is to understand what Obama is and why he is so dangerous.

Since the seating of the Estates General on the eve of the French Revolution, the terms right and left have been synonymous with the social basis of politics, the idea that generally there is a relationship between one’s place in the class system and one’s allegiance to a political party.

But what if the extremes of politics could be further partitioned according to their social base? The distinguished political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset took fascism and divided into right, left, and center, depending on from which social elements a fascist party drew its support.

The Peronists became the fascists of the left, and the Nazis became the fascists of the middle class.

Lipset’s insight was marred in one regard. He ignored the role of the political periphery, the non-participants, in Hitler’s surge to power. Hitler’s fascism was more of the left than the center, more of the dispossessed than of those who belonged. Hitler organized “masses not classes,” in the sense that the masses occupied Germany’s social periphery.

As Obama learned, when the “masses” enter the political system, they want to hear a different, more radical, message. Obama’s base is not only the far left; it is also those on the margins of the economy.

Juan Peron had been the Argentine representative to Italy during the period of Mussolini’s fascist regime. Mussolini’s fascism, like Hitler’s, was based on the left, but with in one particular difference. Mussolini pursued a concept of syndicalism, the mobilization of trade unions that were given power in exchange for allegiance to a strong state. Where the Nazis totally took over all competing organizations, Mussolini yielded independence to the unions in exchange for their support, as he had done in his infamous concordat with the Vatican.

Peron was impressed by Italian fascism. After his ascendance to the presidency of Argentina in 1946, he implemented a social revolution based on support from the trade unions and working classes, a form of government modeled after Mussolini’s regime. His popular second wife, Eva (Evita), was an advocate for his reforms. Eva often walked through the streets of Argentina dispensing cash handouts to the poor.

Early in his first term, Peron nationalized the banks and passed out huge Christmas bonuses. He pursued legislation favorable to the unions and when the legislation was resisted, the unions, with Peron’s support, went out on massive and violent strikes, not totally unlike the recent scenes from Wisconsin. The General Conference of Labor (CGT) in the first four years of Peron’s regime went from a membership of 500,000 to two million. Peron’s support for the CGT made Argentina the most highly unionized economy in the world.

Predictably, Peron’s reforms led to a bloated government bureaucracy that drained resources from the private sector. Universal health care and high social security benefits further increased the bureaucracy and monetary liquidity. Pumping money artificially into both social programs and wages caused an inflation rate of 52%, by 1951, coupled with a massive trade deficit — as money chased foreign goods.

As workers’ purchasing power declined because of inflation, the CGT turned on Peron. And Peron retaliated, transforming Argentina into a dictatorship with repression and torture and promulgating intense class warfare. Life reached such a boiling point that when Eva contracted cancer, the political opposition wrote graffiti that praised the disease.

Peron’s nationalization of industry was limited. He was more than willing to incorporate into his regime industrialists who shared his view of “social justice” and were willing to contribute to Eva’s charity, which had a fund equivalent to 1% of GDP. So, too, Obama has had no problem with crony capitalism and the maintenance of corporate welfare.

When Peron was ousted from power in 1955 by a military coup, price inflation had reached 500%. Still, the classes that supported him point to the working conditions he changed, the medical and social security benefits he delivered, and the infrastructure he built — without acknowledging the overall disaster that became Argentina’s economy.

So we are now faced with similar economic policies in the Obama administration. Peron knew his base, so too does Obama. The president was elected by the counties with the greatest crime rates, largest rates of unemployment, those most in need of government handouts, and those which would and did most benefit from administration’sredistribution of wealth. Obama mobilized the electoral periphery, those who don’t usually vote. And he nurtured the unions — not just the SEIU, but also the United Auto Workers, who were put at the head of the line, over the bondholders in the GM bailout. (Now Obama’s National Labor Relations Board is preventing Boeing from movingto right-to-work South Carolina.)

Nationalized health care is a program designed to improve the lot of the fifteen percent of the population without health care at the expense of the eighty five percent that are satisfied with it. But those fifteen percent are Obama’s base — just as are the forty-seven percent who don’t pay federal income tax.

Obama is not going to nationalize the means of production. Marxists do that. Peronists build relationships with workers, unions, and the people who will riot in the streets. Peronists use those mechanisms to force compliance from those who oppose them.

Similarly, in Obama’s world, where there is opposition to the policies of labor, the SEIU (Sevice Employees International Union) will be out in force. The administration and a compliant media will be attempting to provide these bullies with both legitimacy and symbolic affirmation. This is what Peron did for the bullies of the CGT.

Marxism is about ownership. Peronism is about control, sometimes through ownership but more often through pressure. If you want to understand pressure, talk to bankers who didn’t want to make marginal loans under the Community Reinvestment Act or those who had almost no subprime mortgages and refused to accept TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) money. In both cases, the FDIC exerted enormous pressure to force complianceto decisions banks saw as inimical to their interests.

Obama the Peronist is more insidious, more difficult to fight, because he is not a Marxist. A grab for ownership stares you in the face. It is as blunt as it is obvious. But control is incremental and surreptitious.

Every day we awake to more and more government control, not by ownership, but by unaccountable czars, ukases, and bureaucratic organizations dictating how we conduct our lives.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a former head of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-israel-and-the-politics-of-narcissism/

Wondering why Obama would blunder so to get out in front of the Palestinians on a position that Israel would be compelled to reject?  Follow the link to Pajamas media. The answer is in who Obama really is.

On the eve of the execution of Osama bin Laden the media was criticizing Obama's failure to lead.  Suddenly the messiah was re- anointed.  The twisted and sycophantic relationship between the media and Obama is explored in this PJM piece, which looks back at the 2008 campaign and the latest developments in the aftermath of the killing of bin Laden.


http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/osama-obama-and-the-media/?singlepage=true

Judge Richard Goldstone's legacy of shame:  an Apartheid judge whose blood libel did major damage to the Jewish state now recants. But his retraction is tepid and the damage persists. Follow: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/richard-goldstone%E2%80%99s-legacy-of-shame-continues/ the link:

There is not a no-fly zone over Zimbabwe, where an oppressive dictator capriciously murders its citizens while condemning them to a life of poverty. There is not a no-fly zone over Bahrain, where the Saudi National Guard is reinforcing a regime shooting its people in the streets. There is not a no-fly zone over Yemen, which is also shooting demonstrators. There is not a no-fly zone over Syria, where the Assad dynasty is once again killing the opposition, and where decades earlier — without a hiccup from the international community — it destroyed the entire city of Hama to suppress an uprising.

None of the pious rationales for intervention in Libya seem to square remotely with the way in which the international community generally, and the United States specifically, deals with tyrants.

Just days prior to our intervention in Libya, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was before the cameras admonishing everyone that no-fly zones don’t work, using Iraq as a case in point.

So what changed?

If we are to believe Andrea Mitchell, the Arab League convinced Hillary Clinton to persuade the administration to bring down the murderous Libyan dictator. This explanation is so comical that it should be a skit for Saturday Night Live. The Arab League is made up of some of the most ruthless, oppressive, and illegitimate regimes on the planet. The league is best-known for issuing the infamous “Three Nos of Khartoum,” condemning Israel for its very existence, and lobbing fiercely just weeks ago for a UN human rights accolade for the same Libyan dictator it asserts that it now wants to remove from power.

Persuaded by the Arab League, so the story goes, Hillary Clinton found an ally in UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and these “courageous women” joined forces to get the administration to support the UN no-fly zone.

This tale of the Arab League and Hillary Clinton seems to be one of those typical contrived leaks for which Washington is famous. Indeed, within twenty-four hours, the Arab League shifted sides, and is now condemning the Western powers for the fierce bombing.

Libya has a no-fly zone because the British and French want Libyan oil, and they no longer view the ever-bellicose and irrational Moammar Gaddafi as a responsible partner. Nations have interests. They do not have friends. They have allies as a matter of ephemeral convenience.

When CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt reinstalled the Palavi dynasty in Iran after the CIA-sponsored coup that eliminated Mohammed Mossadegh, among Mohammed Palavi’s first acts was to replace the Anglo-French oil companies with American oil companies.

If Zimbabwe had oil, it too might get a no-fly zone.

Britain is so desperate for drilling rights in Libya that it engineered the release and repatriation of the Libyan bomber of Pan American Flight 103, ignoring international outrage. France is one of the major importers of Libyan oil, and France accepted trivial compensation for a Libyan mid-air bombing of one its flights, UTA 772. The incident, like Pan Am 103, was settled by Gaddafi’s government paying monetary compensation to the victims’ families.

After tolerating the murder of its citizens in order to get access to Libya’s  easily refined oil, Britain and France saw in Libya’s uprising the handwriting on the wall. Gaddafi might end up on the scrap heap of history, and what Britain and France needed was a new Libyan partner.

With Britain and France ostensibly standing up for the “democratic” opposition and the media bringing the visual horror of Gaddafi’s words and deeds to the world, the Obama administration could not continue to sit on the sidelines. Yet the media has been beating the drums over the “democratic” opposition, but there has been no real analysis of what the opposition will bring to the political process, if they do win.

In the meantime, Hillary Clinton’s earlier warning that no-fly zones are ineffectual because they don’t stop troops and tanks has been superseded in this conflict by the French. Their air force has been doing more than just keeping Libyan planes out of the air. They shot up Libyan tanks and armor, carving out seemingly new rules of engagement without objection, until the Arab League began to complain.

If the Arab League wanted to stop Gaddafi, they didn’t have to wait until his forces were near victorious, nor did they really need the West to carry out the attacks. Egypt and Saudi Arabia alone could have defeated Gaddafi, but ultimately they had no desire to do so. What they had was the desire to rhetorically enter the fray and to posture appropriately for the international community when it appeared Gaddafi would win. After all, the continual fall of Arab tyrants and despots threatens the Arab League itself, an organization comprised of despots and tyrants.

Obama has dragged us into yet another endless war in the Islamic world, a war where the military mission is clear, as it was in the early days of Iraq, and where the strategy and endgame are totally undefined. Britain’s and France’s strategic interests in this conflict are unambiguous. America’s?  They are no clearer than they are in Zimbabwe and a host of other places where people are wantonly oppressed and killed by tyrants.

Obama’s ineptitude made him an easy patsy for the strategic interests of Britain and France. American blood and treasure will be needlessly spilled because we have elected a president who is too disengaged to lead and too naive to understand the consequences of his actions.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a former head of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/egypt-and-iran-will-we-again-fuel-the-fires-of-revolution/

                       Tragedy, Hypocrisy and Cynicism in Tucson: Some Lives are Worth More than

                                                              Others

 

                                                  Abraham H. Miller

 

It was fitting for the nation to memorialize those who fell and those who were wounded in the Tucson tragedy. Such memorials of course are always more for the living than the dead.  They provide an important socio-political ritual, reintegrating who we are as a society as we share common grief.  Such coming together is a means of healing. We assuage our sense of loss in the company of others; we laud the dead and injured by speaking of them in ways they were seldom otherwise mentioned.

 

Gabrielle Giffords emerges as healer who transcended partisanship and as a role model for women, The nation hangs on to every sign and update of improvement. Politicians now relish their associate with her, especially if it generates two minute of air time. 

 

The memorial service had all the decorum of a football rally, complete with t-shirts that seemed designed to launch the next presidential campaign.  The president could have held up his hand, and brought the crowd back to the solemnity of the occasion.  But narcissism prevailed.  The president could not resist his cheerleaders.

 

We are a society that experiences no reality without the media.  We take the private and intimate and care not for requisite dignity but for publicity.  Our rituals are exercises in cynicism at best or posturing for the cameras at worst. 

 

 The president read the teleprompter well.  To those who wanted the tragedy to be viewed through the prism of partisan conflict, he spoke of coming together, and to those who sought exoneration from the bombast of accusation that they nurtured the ideology that pulled the trigger, he reminded us that the act was that of a deranged individual.

 

              When it is all said and done, when the eulogizing is over, when the cheering stops, when the t-shirts go into the clothes hamper, and the cameras and lights are shut off, we might want to reflect whether the memorial inadvertently conveyed the message that some lives are more precious than others.

 

As the victims of the deranged Jared Loughner deserved to be remembered publicly, so too there are others whose lives and faces deserve equal public attention, but their lives, except to their loved ones, fade away  into the  columns of the  crime-incident pages of the their local papers.

 

I am speaking of the nameless and faceless victims who have been murdered, raped, assaulted, and robbed by illegal aliens.  There are no memorials for them, no public vigils, no symbolic rituals, no presidential addresses, and no emotional letters eulogizing them from first ladies.

 

Illegal aliens are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime.  We could argue over whether that statement should be modified to control for age or education or other issues that tantalize social scientists.  But to the victims of illegal alien crime, these hair splits are of no consequence.  If the illegal aliens were prevented from entering, if sanctuary cities didn’t protect them, if immigration laws were enforced, there would be fewer victims.

 

The Foreign National Crime Information Center maintains a Victims of Illegal Alien Crime Memorial.  These tragedies too need to be seared into our conscience.

 

Just south of Tucson, in March of last year, Robert Krentz, age 58, an Arizona rancher was murdered by an illegal alien, who escaped back to Mexico.

 

             Adams County, Colorado Sheriff Deputy Alexander Kondos was shot three times by illegal alien Sergio Estrada-Gomez.  As part of the revolving door deportation process, Estrada-Gomez had been deported three years earlier by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

 

 

  Michael Bologna, his father Anthony, and younger brother Mathew were gunned down in San Francisco when one of the boys was mistakenly taken for a rival gang member. Edwin Ramos, who had prior convictions for violent crimes and had been incarcerated, allegedly sprayed the Bologna car with an automatic weapon fire.  Although arrested for violent crimes, including the robbery of a pregnant woman, Ramos benefited from San Francisco’s sanctuary law, which prevented local law enforcement from notifying federal immigration about Ramos’ immigration status. 

 

Diego Francisco Escobar-Landaverde was arrested in Tennessee for the pre-meditated  rape of a twelve-year-old girl.  Escobar had previously been deported but made his way back to La Vergne, Tennessee: another tribute to the revolving door policy of deportation.

 

The people who have been victimized by illegal aliens number in the thousands.  The Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI do not keep records of victims by the perpetrators’ immigration status.  These have to be culled individually from media accounts.  The government does not acknowledge these victims. Somehow, their lives and their families’ sufferings are not worthy of the same respect as those who fell in Tucson. 

 

Yet, if immigration policy were properly enforced, these people would not have been victims.  It is far and away easier to prevent the crimes committed by illegal aliens than that of a deranged individual.  Enforcing the immigration laws, prohibiting sanctuary cities, and removing the incentives and conditions that make it possible for illegal immigration to flourish would all severely curtail the number of people who end up as victims.

 

     Certainly, the lives of these people are no less important and no less worthy than those eulogized in Tucson. 

 ************************************************************************************

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and former chairman of the intelligence studies section of the International Studies Association.

                       Have They No Shame?  The Exploitation of a National Tragedy

 

                                                        Abraham H. Miller

 

 

Even for the liberal mainstream media, crafting political opportunity out of the bloodshed in Tucson is a new low.  Apparently, Rahm Emanuel’s aphorism, “Never let  a serious cri\sis go to waste,” is too appealing in this instance to be restrained by political morality 

 

Attributing Jared Loughner’s crime to Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and the voices on talk radio is like attributing the Son of Sam murders to the voices serial killer David Berkowitz heard. 

 

Jared Loughner, like David Berkowitz, is deranged. Loughner’s  politics is a muddle of confusion.  He lists the Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books, hardly something to be found on the reading lists of Sarah Palin, Glen Beck or Mark Levin.  Yet, no one on the left has made the accusation that Marx’s call to revolution inspired Jared Loughner as it did some of the greatest mass murders to walk the world’s stage: Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and certainly not to ignore the psychopathic Felix Dzerizhinsky,  director of the Checka.  

 

If Sarah Palin did not exist, the left would have to invent her.  Her website with its crosshairs on politicians is the “gotchua” of the event. The outraged left cannot tell the difference between targeting someone at the polls and assassinating them.  But there is not a shred of evidence that Jared Loughner ever saw Sarah Palin’s web site.  Certainly more than two and a half million people have and if the site were so inspiring to political violence, we’d be shooting at each other in the streets by now.

 

If you really want to understand the likes of a Jared Loughner and not score political points, all you need to do is open up Seymour Martin Lipset’s contemporary classic, Political Man  and read the reprinted piece titled, “Interview with a Fascist Beast,” a rambling statement by a violent, young, British neo-Nazi. Loughner’s chaotic ramblings on YouTube are quite similar, and in both cases, it would be quite logical to conclude that we are not really looking at politics as much as we are looking at mental problems.

 

In the first reports of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the left found another political opportunity in crisis.  The news media instantly claimed that the right wing climate in Dallas, the hate capital of the South, was responsible for the president’s assassination.  When Lee Harvey Oswald’s communist background emerged—his involvement in Fair Play for Cuba, his defection to the Soviet Union—the media stopped making irrational leaps about causes.  After all, they would have to talk about left ideology as being responsible for the assassination.

 

Most of all let us not forget the left’s vicious rhetoric toward George W. Bush.  I have friends and relatives who openly spoke of “hating” Bush in ways that could only be described as either pathological or pathetically stupid.  Liberals, self-proclaimed caring people, spoke openly about wishing someone would assassinate President Bush. The Norwegian Socialist Left Party actually offered a reward on its website to anyone who would kill the president, and the only outrage it drew in Norway was from the American ambassador.  The same media that has gone ballistic over Tucson was deafening in its silence over the website.  Then there was the wishful British fantasy, Death of a President, a fictional documentary whose plot centered on the assassination of George W. Bush in Chicago. Publicity for the film and commentary from leftist pundits further underscored the film’s venomous intent, which received critical claim from the leftist arts crowd.  Where was the outrage then?

 

People who will tell you that pornographic violence against women is watched by millions and is harmless, will also unhesitatingly tell you that Sarah Palin’s website created a climate of violence that resulted in the shooting in Tucson.  Such people are, of course, too ignorant to be aware of their own hypocrisy, let alone confront it. 

 

No ideology has a monopoly on advocating violence or indulging in bad taste.  But given that our media is dominated by those on the left side of the political continuum, by people who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and who despise their political opponents, it is no wonder that Rahm Emanuel’s pithy aphorism has come into play to exploit the tragedy of Tucson.  We should all raise our voices against this abuse of a national tragedy and ask the left: “Have you no shame?”

 

_________________________________________________________

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and former chairman of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies

                       Have They No Shame?  The Exploitation of a National Tragedy

 

                                                        Abraham H. Miller

 

 

Even for the liberal mainstream media, crafting political opportunity out of the bloodshed in Tucson is a new low.  Apparently, Rahm Emanuel’s aphorism, “Never let  a serious cri\sis go to waste,” is too appealing in this instance to be restrained by political morality 

 

Attributing Jared Loughner’s crime to Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and the voices on talk radio is like attributing the Son of Sam murders to the voices serial killer David Berkowitz heard. 

 

Jared Loughner, like David Berkowitz, is deranged. Loughner’s  politics is a muddle of confusion.  He lists the Communist Manifesto as one of his favorite books, hardly something to be found on the reading lists of Sarah Palin, Glen Beck or Mark Levin.  Yet, no one on the left has made the accusation that Marx’s call to revolution inspired Jared Loughner as it did some of the greatest mass murders to walk the world’s stage: Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and certainly not to ignore the psychopathic Felix Dzerizhinsky,  director of the Checka.  

 

If Sarah Palin did not exist, the left would have to invent her.  Her website with its crosshairs on politicians is the “gotchua” of the event. The outraged left cannot tell the difference between targeting someone at the polls and assassinating them.  But there is not a shred of evidence that Jared Loughner ever saw Sarah Palin’s web site.  Certainly more than two and a half million people have and if the site were so inspiring to political violence, we’d be shooting at each other in the streets by now.

 

If you really want to understand the likes of a Jared Loughner and not score political points, all you need to do is open up Seymour Martin Lipset’s contemporary classic, Political Man  and read the reprinted piece titled, “Interview with a Fascist Beast,” a rambling statement by a violent, young, British neo-Nazi. Loughner’s chaotic ramblings on YouTube are quite similar, and in both cases, it would be quite logical to conclude that we are not really looking at politics as much as we are looking at mental problems.

 

In the first reports of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the left found another political opportunity in crisis.  The news media instantly claimed that the right wing climate in Dallas, the hate capital of the South, was responsible for the president’s assassination.  When Lee Harvey Oswald’s communist background emerged—his involvement in Fair Play for Cuba, his defection to the Soviet Union—the media stopped making irrational leaps about causes.  After all, they would have to talk about left ideology as being responsible for the assassination.

 

Most of all let us not forget the left’s vicious rhetoric toward George W. Bush.  I have friends and relatives who openly spoke of “hating” Bush in ways that could only be described as either pathological or pathetically stupid.  Liberals, self-proclaimed caring people, spoke openly about wishing someone would assassinate President Bush. The Norwegian Socialist Left Party actually offered a reward on its website to anyone who would kill the president, and the only outrage it drew in Norway was from the American ambassador.  The same media that has gone ballistic over Tucson was deafening in its silence over the website.  Then there was the wishful British fantasy, Death of a President, a fictional documentary whose plot centered on the assassination of George W. Bush in Chicago. Publicity for the film and commentary from leftist pundits further underscored the film’s venomous intent, which received critical claim from the leftist arts crowd.  Where was the outrage then?

 

People who will tell you that pornographic violence against women is watched by millions and is harmless, will also unhesitatingly tell you that Sarah Palin’s website created a climate of violence that resulted in the shooting in Tucson.  Such people are, of course, too ignorant to be aware of their own hypocrisy, let alone confront it. 

 

No ideology has a monopoly on advocating violence or indulging in bad taste.  But given that our media is dominated by those on the left side of the political continuum, by people who overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and who despise their political opponents, it is no wonder that Rahm Emanuel’s pithy aphorism has come into play to exploit the tragedy of Tucson.  We should all raise our voices against this abuse of a national tragedy and ask the left: “Have you no shame?”

 

_________________________________________________________

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and former chairman of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies

Many Students Learn Little to Nothing in College. Surprise?

No kidding. The big surprise is that this is news to anybody.

January 20, 2011 - by Abraham H. Miller

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The recent study of 2,300 college students showing that half of them learn nearly nothing in the first two years is generating a lot of conversation. As someone who spent more than three decades in the professoriate, what surprises me is why this is news.

Certainly the students know this. We know this. The college administrators know this. Maybe, it’s only the parents who are suckered into thinking that the tens if not hundreds of thousands they are shelling out for a residential college education is really buying that.

Look — if your child did well in high school, got excellent SAT scores, and signed up for a demanding major, you have nothing to worry about, except the price tag. And if that’s not a problem, you can stop reading right here.

But plenty of you parents know you have children who rarely cracked a book, got mediocre high school grades, and really have no interest in the demands of a real college learning experience. They got into less demanding schools or curricula, or you’re paying out-of-state tuition money for the privilege of sending your kid someplace he couldn’t have gotten into if he lived in-state.

When you toured the campus and saw the surrounding bars and clubs, when you saw the campus shopping mall that was designed to look like Rodeo Drive, and when you toured the athletic facility that rivals an upscale sports club, did you pause to think that those were not assets to the pursuit of the life of the mind? Of course not! You were impressed. Did you forget that the monks preserved the learning of Western civilization?

I’ve been on the orientation tour with you, as the young man and young woman decked out in their school-spirit sweat shirts took you around the campus. And what kinds of questions did you ask? When you went to the library, you were inspired by the building. You asked not a word about the collection or the on-line computer stations. You wanted to know about the social life, the shopping, and how well the athletic teams were doing. When was homecoming, so you could plan your visit?

I remember when one set of parents asked how much people studied per class, what the intellectual demands were, and were there a lot of term papers in the liberal arts courses. The tour guides were dumbfounded, and the rest of you looked at this couple like they were the biggest bunch of party poopers. You kept some distance from these parents during the rest of the tour, as if they had a visible case of leprosy. Their son was an engineering major, and he did very well in school. By the way, they were sufficiently disgusted with the guides’ lack of intellectual concern that they wrote a letter about it to the faculty.

Your son probably ended up in my class. He was the kid who slouched in his chair and sat in the back entertaining himself with his Nintendo or cell phone. At least, that’s how he behaved when he bothered to show up for class. Sometimes he disrupted class by coming late and being sure to walk across the front of the lecture hall to draw attention to himself. I wished that on such occasions he had the grace to have pulled his Levis above his underwear. But that was too much to ask.

Of course, he got a degree.

We have to sit through lectures by our incomparable elected officials and our distinguished administrators telling us how many people the state needs by such and such a year with college degrees. We know how to give degrees. We’re good at that. But an education? Even God could not compensate for the lack of skills, the lack of interest, and the lack of raw talent your son brought to us. Social promotion is not restricted to high schools any more. After all, somehow we have to pay for all those buildings, athletic facilities, and shopping malls that so impressed you.

Now your son is carrying a load of debt that he can’t pay off, and he can’t find a meaningful job because he really has no skills that translate into the marketplace. He never committed himself to the discipline, rigor, and fortitude it takes to get a meaningful education. He didn’t know what to do with himself; you didn’t know what to do with him, and you thought he should have a college experience. He did, in the sense that four years of recreational sex, hard drugs, and bars that are open late into the night provided him with a college experience.

You would have been better off giving him the cash to invest and sending him to the Caribbean or Vegas for several weeks every year where he could have indulged his sexual appetites and legally smoked ganja. Financially you would have both been ahead. So too would we.

Now, we have an overly credentialed population carrying an enormous debt.

These are people who feel they deserve good-paying jobs. After all, the education establishment told them that having a college degree was worth millions. Well it is, if it is in the right subjects and you did well. A political science degree is not exactly equal to a degree in computer engineering, although the campus feminists are always grousing over how much less they are paid than males of equal rank and seniority. How convenient to forget that the liberal arts, which possess no competitive external marketplace, are dominated by women, and engineering, science, and mathematics are dominated by men.

The next financial bubble is out there. It is comprised of people like your son who are carrying enormous debt without any prospect of paying it off. They are going to default. It’s our fault, you say. Well, you say that now. But if we gave your son the grades he deserved you both would have screamed foul and due processed us to death. If your son is a member of some protected class, we would have had to defend against the accusation that we discriminated against him. Anyhow, he got more than he deserved, and the rest of us subsidized his education directly or indirectly with our tax dollars. Of course, you do know that we are going to have to pick up the defaults, just as we picked up the sub-prime mortgages.

Oh yes, if you think the statistic that half don’t learn anything in the first two years is terrible, how does this one grab you? After four years 36% did not experience significant educational improvement. And that statistic is worse than it appears, because at many institutions nearly half the students drop out after two years. So among the self-selected that continued, more than a third learned almost nothing in four years of college.

And if you controlled by academic major and prior preparation, you would find that these failures cluster. How? It’s easy enough to figure out, even if you never finished college.

But don’t worry. The system won’t change, not even after the defaults. There are too many vested interests that benefit from the system. Colleges are labor-intensive operations. They employ lots of people at all sorts of levels. In economic downturns, they expand their physical plants. And besides, parents want to see degrees, not failures. Students want the campus experience. Everyone needs to believe the myth, and we are as good as Elmer Gantry at selling it.

We continue to drain the intellectual capital of the rest of the world. That enables us to compensate for the abundance of people we produce who are without academic or economic skills. When the defaults come, we will print more money and maybe foreclose on a few for-profit institutions. There will be congressional hearings, a few scapegoats from the for-profit world, and a few horror stories about exploitative student loans. There will be an academic Enron and an academic Countrywide. When the smoke clears, the academic AIG will have bailed out the academic Goldman Sachs for one hundred cents on the dollar. And it will be business as usual.

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a former head of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association.

                                  The Higher Education Problem and Some Solutions

 

                                                           Abraham H. Miller

 

 

A recent study of college undergraduates showed that there was no significant learning, critical thinking development, or writing improvement among nearly half of college students by the end of the sophomore year.  At the end of four years and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses, more than a third of college students learned little to nothing.    

 

 No one who has taught in a college or university in the last several decades would be surprised by those findings.  A lot of people go to college and learn nothing. The recent concerns of a student loan bubble that rivals the sub-prime crisis is inadvertently reflected in the research.

 

Students emerge with degrees but are unable to find jobs to put those degrees to work.  Without doubt that is partially due to the current economic situation. But there is another reason.  Colleges and universities have callously awarded degrees by using flexible and malleable standards.

 

Where subjectivity is a strong component of grading there is a higher likelihood of simply pushing students through. Colleges increasingly are tuition dependent as state resources are withdrawn because of budgetary problems.  In many states, subsidies increase as a student moves through the years, with colleges receiving a far greater financial stipend for seniors than for freshmen.  The incentive to the colleges is to retain students, not to apply standards.

 

The result is that colleges have learned how to grant degrees, not necessarily to provide educations.  But it is ludicrous to simply blame the colleges.  Higher learning is a special activity that not only requires of students a certain amount of raw intelligence, but also psychological and motivational aptitudes to commit to what should be the demanding process of learning. 

 

Only a small percentage of students are really capable of partaking in and benefiting from the experience. Test scores, high school grades, and recommendations only attest to the likelihood of college success; without motivation, interest, and intellectual stamina those conditions are insufficient to developing the skills and mastering the material that leads to an education.  And many students enter college without even the necessary conditions for success let alone both the necessary and sufficient ones.

 

We have created the myth that everyone can benefit from the college experience, without acknowledging what those benefits might be. For many, college is nothing more than enhanced access to alcohol, drugs and sex. Clubs and bars dot the campus landscape in abundance. I once asked a class if it were possible to leave class, buy hard drugs and return before the fifty minute hour was over. Half a dozen eager students volunteered to show this could not only be achieved but were willing to bet one another as to who could “score” and return first.  Needless to say, the quest was not implemented.       

 

Today, the colleges are vendors.  The students are consumers.  They are to be lured with fancy dorms, fashionable shopping malls, and recreation centers that rival upscale athletic clubs.  A student with a bad grade is a disgruntled consumer, and if he is the least bit sophisticated, he can achieve vengeance by due-processing the professor to death, first with testimony from his friends as to the failings of the professor, and then through a series of  procedural reviews.  Finally, the case will land on the desk of some administrator who will have vigorously embraced Marshall Field’s famous aphorism, “The customer is always right.”

 

A dissatisfied consumer is one thing.  A dissatisfied member of a protected class presents a qualitative different problem, where accusations of identity bias will play a prominent role in the plaintiff’s complaint. These will appeal to the identity bureaucracy that needs such complaints to justify its bloated existence. Members of this bureaucracy will volunteer to get involved to buttress the “abused” student’s case.  

 

Over a scotch at the faculty club, you will hear more than one war story of being threatened with due-process that is concluded with the refrain, “I gave the sob a “B”  and to hell with him.” 

 

Because as a society we demand a college education to lift boxes on the loading dock, we have students who don’t want to be in college, don’t relish the yearly accumulation of increasing debt, and are angry about the process, but see few alternatives.  We are a credentialed society.  We claim that we relish diversity and achievement, but we are drawn to status.  We assume that a degree from a status institution means something more than it really does. Often it means that the person got in the door and had the financial resources to pay the tuition.  We overlook the hard-working, impoverished student who worked his way through a public college and had no time for the hedonism of the “college experience.” 

 

We are now seeing in the colleges some of the same dysfunctional behavior we see in high school: angry students, acting out, disrupting classes, slouching in their seats, conspicuously looking bored and waiting for class to end.  

 

Meanwhile the mounting debt and lack of available jobs for people who have managed to acquire degrees without educations, and even those with educations, places the society in jeopardy of another financial crisis. Let’s face reality.  Many of the jobs that require college degrees do not really require college educations, and both employers and graduates know this. 

 

We need to provide opportunities for people who are not interested in or capable of benefiting from a real college experience.  There are a whole host of technical educations that would greatly advantage both society and students, and we have largely given that education over to the for-profit education system.  This places a large financial debt on students whose incomes will be good but not substantial.  There is a need for public education to provide a larger role here and for students to be counseled to post-secondary education options other than traditional college educations.

 

The generation before mine produced physicians and lawyers who went from high school to professional school.  In my generation there were numerous three year programs that led to entry into professional school  Now students generally need a four-year degree to enter professional school, and teachers often need a fifth year to be certified.  Has all of this extra “education” really made for better lawyers, doctors and teachers?  Does one really need required courses in the debilitating propaganda of   “identity studies” to become educated?  All this has done is to increase student debt and tuition revenue to maintain the academic façade.  We should strongly consider reducing the number of years of college before professional school or even placement exams that would permit a direct route for the brightest students.  

 

            So how do we as a society teetering on a student loan collapse change this?  First, we should expand community colleges and publicly funded on-line programs.  The British used the Royal Mail in the 19^th Century to create a program of distance learning that reached the overseas colonies.  In the mid-20^th C, it was possible in the United Kingdom to get college credit by turning on the BBC.  The Internet age means that access to distance learning is increasingly possible, and it should not be monopolized by the for-profit institutions.

 

The first two years of college are generally a review of high school.  There is absolutely no financial justification for spending money in an expensive institution, public or private.  If your child needs two years away from home to indulge in recreational sex and drugs, send him to Caribbean for a couple of weeks several times a year.   It will be a lot cheaper and likely more memorable.

 

Get rid of the “identity” studies programs, and the “identity” bureaucracy.  The identity bureaucracy consumes between three to five percent of a traditional institutions’ budget, and the mandatory courses in ethnic cheerleading and propaganda are generally recognized as a waste of time and a Works Progress Program for intellectually challenged minorities. 

 

Use civic centers, senior centers, and public libraries as satellite learning centers dispensing college credit, providing easy access to everyone who wants a no-frills college education. The technology exists.  There is no reason a campus lecture couldn’t be broadcast out to communities drawing in more students and providing revenue for the institution.   

 

If tax policy can determine where a society wants money invested, then financial aid policies can provide incentives as to what skills a society needs from the college educated.  Right now, we need more engineers and fewer liberal arts majors and lawyers. Let’s provide incentives for those outcomes.  

 

Higher education is in many ways a corporate subsidy.  Major corporations with large campuses should start their own educational facilities and receive appropriate accreditation.  This would enhance the practical value of an education by putting into the classroom people with real business and technical experience. There should be enhanced people-to-people partnerships between businesses and higher education.   

 

A traditional bachelor’s degree should and could be streamlined into three years. Some Western countries have never had a four college program and produce fine graduates.  The amount of high school repetition, intellectual fluff, compulsory ethnic propaganda courses, and distribution requirements no one wants to take, which serve primarily to capture more tuition money, could all easily be eliminated.  No student will miss them.  And in reality few administrators will miss the identity programs  because these departments are a nightmare of political turmoil seeded with people who believe they are entitled to unlimited claims as societal victims.

 

Of course, there are too many vested interests that benefit from the traditional bricks-and-mortar, four-year system, with its lavish building programs, malls and captive consumers. And there are too many parents who will indulge their children in a college life-style rather than a college education.

 

Yet, a major student loan default appears on the horizon, and when the collapse comes, we will be compelled to at least look at what higher education should look like, albeit I am pessimistic about change as the vested interests are unlikely to yield the cosseted sinecures the current system provides without a massive lobbying effort on behalf of the status quo.

 

If we want the 21^st Century to remain the American Century, we at least have to consider that the current system is dysfunctional for us as a society and needs to be changed.

 

Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science.

            

              Rezko, Obama, the Chicago Combine: Corruption We Can Believe In

                                            Abraham H. Miller

If Tony Rezko were young, blonde and disappeared on a CaribbeanIsland, Greta Van Sustern would have been all over the Rezko trial. And that very particular Chicago definition of “clout” would have been ingrained in everyone’s lexicon. 

But Tony (Antoin) Rezko is simply another middle-aged, bald, Chicago developer who was involved in an influence peddling and kick-back scheme that was connected to a number of politicians, a couple of pension funds, an Iraqi businessman (prepared to upfront millions for bail) and, oh yes, Senator Barack Obama. A jury hit Tony with a conviction on sixteen felony counts out of twenty four in the indictment.

Corruption, at least corruption old-fashioned Chicago style, is par for the city’s political culture. Unlike corruption in other cities, Chicago corruption usually trickled down to the little guy. The myth is that everyone benefited.  Of course, some people benefited a lot more than others.

And Chicago corruption was always underscored by a nice dose of reality. When one prominent politician was asked about directing the city’s insurance business to his relatives, he gave a resoundingly uncomplicated answer: Why would anyone bother to go into politics, if he couldn’t throw a little business to his loved ones. 

 We Chicagoans can resonate to the crisp truthfulness of the response. 

 Unlike academia where the corruption is so intense, the stakes are so small, and the justifications truly Kafkaesque, the guy on the right side of the take in Chicago could, well, like Tony Rezko, buy a great mansion in fashionable Wilmette, or like Barack Obama get a real discount on a mansion in trendy and liberal Hyde Park-Kenwood.

No further rationale would be required. 

Since 1972, on average two Chicago politicians per year have been convicted of felonies.   In 1991, when not one Chicago Alderman was convicted or even indicted, the Sun-Times ran that deviant event as a front-page story. 

Michelle Obama spent just three years at the Chicago Law Firm of Sidley Austin, far less than a typical associate on the career path to be partner. In a move incongruous with the alleged iconic credentials that are a mainstay of the Michelle hagiography, she took a job with the Democratic machine.  

Probably some people think you leave a high- powered, prestigious law firm like Sidley Austin to take a job with the Chicago machine to save the world. But no one who knows how Chicago works is going to buy that!

 Michelle was subsequently hired by the University of Chicago, ultimately ending up as the University of Chicago Hospital’s Vice President for External Affairs. Barack  was chair of the Illinois Senate’s powerful Health and Human Services Committee, the position tied by some to the Rezko scandal.  

If you don’t get the picture, you are definitely not from Chicago. 

 In 2007 the not-for-profit University of Chicago hospital turned out a profit of 143 million, and is up 118 million for 2008. The hospital is scheduled to receive a 30 million infusion from Medicaid, and will be turning some of its Medicaid patients to another hospital to free up space for its private insurance paying patients. According to the (London ) Daily Mail (online), in 2006 the hospital turned away an indigent man, who died.

When Michelle exhorts young people to turn down the profit system and do something meaningful with their lives, apparently this is not the example she means to convey. 

Now you might ask what does a community relations director at a university do? That’s really a naïve question. The question is who does the community relation’s director know?

The answer became apparent when Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate and Michelle’s salary more than doubled.  

Barack and Michelle were a power couple hooked into the Democratic machine.  Tony Rezko cultivated them, the Chicago Way. When the Obamas bought their mansion in trendy Hyde Park-Kenwood, Mrs. Rezko bought the lot next door for asking price in a coordinated deal from the same seller. The Obamas got their house at a discount. Mrs. Rezko paid full price.  Later, Mrs. Rezko sold part of the lot to the Obamas to expand their back yard. 

What Rezko wanted from Obama became apparent later. 

To understand the genius of Rezko, you need to understand that for generations, corruption in Chicago was partisan specific. As my mother used to say when she split her ticket, “You need some Republicans. Then the machine can’t steal as much.”

 But then came the Chicago Combine: bipartisan corruption you could believe in.   Rezko established a typical Chicago “pay for play” scheme, but one that crossed party lines. You want to build a hospital, you had to pay Rezko, who paid the appropriate people who could help you play. The problem that Rezko faced was the hospital board had fifteen members and that is a lot of people to bribe and a lot of loose ends. But then Rezko had a friend who chaired the Illinois Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee.

Enter State Senator Barack Obama, who is credited as the moving force behind a piece of bipartisan legislation (Il. Senate Bill 1332) that reduced the hospital board to nine people, to be appointed by Governor Rod Blagojevich (know as Governor “Blago”) with advice and consent of the Illinois Senate.

Blago immediately appointed three physicians, Rezko cronies with similar Middle Eastern backgrounds, all of whom were coincidentally big contributors to Barack Obama. As they say downtown, Barack knows how to walk the Chicago Way.  Rezko became the guy you saw if you wanted to build a health care facility. He controlled the board’s votes. 

The three appointed physicians have been convicted in the Federal probe and are rumored to be about ready to sing. 

Rumor also has it that Patricia Blagojevich, the governor’s wife, is next in line for an indictment.   The Chicago press is now 24/7 on active “Patti Watch.”

For his part, Rezko just sent a “I will not rat out my pals letter,” to United States District Judge Amy St. Eve. Veteran observers of the Chicago crime scene note that the guys who don’t sing, don’t write letters. They just clam up. You write a letter because you want the other guys to be reminded to take care of your wife and kids…college is expensive. 

So, what else does Rezko expect, a presidential pardon, ala Bill Clinton and Carlos Vignali, the dope dealer Clinton’s brother-in-law, Hugh Rodham, represented?

So, here’s the deal. If you don’t want a president making it in the alcove near the Oval Office, don’t elect a guy with a history as a rake and a swordsman. If you don’t want a president who can’t negotiate with the majority of his own party, don’t elect a backwoods, Southern governor with a Jesus complex. If you don’t want a president who orders the break in of the opposition, don’t elect a guy whose career was saturated by paranoia. 

And if you want to make sure that the White House is not going to be tainted by corruption, don’t elect a president who grew up in the Chicago political system and whose wife thinks that the country owes her some palliative to eliminate her sense of personal shame.   Because unlike the stock market, when it comes to human behavior, past performance really is indicative of future results. 

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Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science. He grew up in Chicago’s notorious 24^th Ward, and he is author of a recent work of Chicago-based fiction, “Vorshavsky: A Chicago Story.”